Michael Hooper's rise from Super Rugby triallist to important cog in Wallaby side

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AT the beginning of 2012, Lion-hunter Michael Hooper was literally anonymous running around without a jersey number in a Super Rugby trial searching for a foothold in Australian rugby.

In one short week, a raucous full house at Suncorp Stadium may well be celebrating the compact dynamo as the difference between the Wallabies launching an epic series in style or the British and Irish Lions gloating over a gold carcass.

ACT Brumbies coach Jake White would not have been instantly taken with what he saw physically in Hooper to open 2012. At just under six-foot tall, in the old language, he was more framed like a White half-back than the towering flankers he had left behind in his native South Africa.

White preferred a bigger, bulkier backrow which was the reason for Hooper running on as a replacement open side in a numberless jersey in Cairns early last year for a Reds-Brumbies trial.

He was a break-down pest, a tryscorer, a little tank on two pistons who refused to ever be tackled easily. I looked at the match program but there are no names for numberless jerseys.

It wasn't the first or last time, "Who's that socks-down bloke?", was mumbled as a term of endearment or as a poisoned dart by an opposition coach who lamented Hooper's powerful influence in his breakout year of 2012.

The Hooper impact all made sense yesterday when he revealed the biggest thing that the great George Smith taught him when he was a teenage pup beside him at the Brumbies in 2010.

"It probably wasn't on the field but one of the things he said to me ...'you've got to trust your own game'," Hooper said as the Wallabies' training camp wound up on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

He's not a Smith or David Pocock copy. He's the first Michael Hooper and we can thank his English-born dad David for having the sense to emigrate to Australia or he might have been wearing the Lions No. 7 next week or in 2017 instead of Sam Warburton.

The way Hooper backed himself to run 50m through four Argentinian defenders to save the Wallabies from a lineout pinch in Rosario last October was vintage when the less confident would have hacked a kick away. He just goes all game. He's a more forceful ball-carrier than Pocock or Smith but expert at the body-banging and ball snaffling at the break-down too.

If Warburton's greedy hands are reaching for the ball, the contest will go up a notch.

"I think you come in harder when you see people who are good on the ball. Obviously, if you see a No. 7 jersey on it (the ball) you are going to come in and clean out. It's lights on.," Hooper said.

"You are not going to tackle harder against the Lions than you do against England. The emphasis put on things in this series is just higher. You might fall off one tackle in an international game but in this you're not."

You can't afford it with so much on the line.

Don't worry about searching the Test program for Hooper's number. It's gold No.7. You can be sure of that.

"I did learn a lot in that first season of Test rugby. There's not one way to get the ball back (at the break-down)," he said.

"You can't bank on just pilfering or blowing over (the top) and getting a turnover that way. You have to have a repertoire up to scratch so you can pick and chose the right times."

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